Iomega StorCenter px6-300d Network Storage Review. Page 7

Today we are going to talk about a high performance business class desktop device from Iomega, which promises to be ideal for small-to medium sized businesses and distributed enterprise locations like branch and remote offices, for content sharing and data protection. Powered by EMC storage technology and with up to 18TB of storage capacity, including a diskless option, is should be easy to setup and manage, and affordable to own.

Performance

I couldn’t find six identical HDDs for this test, so I had to add a WD Caviar Blue WD5000AAKS to five Caviar Black WD5001AALS disks. Multi-disk RAIDs worked without any problems. I benchmarked the NAS with Intel NASPT 1.7.1 using one disk or six disks as RAID0, 10, 5 and 6. Jumbo Frames were enabled.

The StorCenter px6-300d is quite fast for its class, delivering a read speed of up to 100 MB/s and a write speed up to 80-90 MB/s. The parity arrays were generally faster than the striped ones, contrary to what one might expect. It means you don’t lose in performance by building RAID5 or 6 arrays on this NAS. This may be due to the file system, which is but seldom employed in serial NASes, or to some problems with the RAID0 implementation.

To check out how fast the NAS is with peripheral storage devices, I took an external HDD from Kingmax (the 640-gigabyte KE-71 model with USB 3.0 interface). After formatting its partition as NTFS, EXT4 or HFS+, I connected it to the USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 ports of the NAS.

The top speeds are 20-40 MB/s with USB 2.0 irrespective of the test pattern and file system. You may want to prefer NTFS and HFS+ for reading whereas EXT4 is faster at writing. NTFS and HFS+ are quite close to each other in terms of speed. EXT4 turns out to be more efficient when processing small files.

The data-transfer speeds grow up with large files when the disk is connected via USB 3.0. The top numbers are 30-85 MB/s. This time around EXT4 seems to be more efficient than the other file systems. It is faster when writing and processing small files and comparable to the others at multithreaded reading.